JACKAL W.E.R.E.

In response to two particularly evocative posts by Noisms

http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/03/cyberwolf-werepunkalypse.html

and

http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-apocalyptic-style-and-spiritual.html

I wrote the following. It borrows liberally from various other sources, but not until I peeped into Scrap Princess’s Noo Futura: 

(https://shop.tuesdayknightgames.com/products/noo-futura)

and heard her hozos hum with endless liability did I understand the greatness and genius of the jackalwere.

https://www.deviantart.com/xtianayuni

So first I scrawled down the following treatise:

The Interurbanet is a series of 57 nodes.

You are a courier between nodes.

There will be interference.

You will be the interference.

Outside the Straight Road it's scary as hell out there.

But, on further reveiw:

The Megacorps are Wolfpacks.

YOU wouldn’t say werewolves. You’d say zombies: the stupid, fast Zak Snyder version. Yeah, I hate those too. That’s what they are though: feral humans, tattered, bodies breaking down from sweets and DA on schedule bar-pushing: the Wolf Mind is running things. They shamble about the shabby cityscape but can MOVE when motivated.

They can talk to you, but it will be gibberish. “I looked over and his eyes were white” kind of thing. They are pretty deep in their heads. But they also know stuff. The interface between fallen man and Corporate Wolfgog.

To get stuff out of them, though, you gotta enter the Wolf Space.

There are terminals. Mostly the packs gather around whatever kind of totem object – usually there’s a hidden PARALLEL that you can patch into a safe distance away. You get really unlucky, they found the parallel and have incorporated it into their outward-facing degenerate “civilization”. This TWISTED PAIR is a pain, but play your cards right you can do some sweet infiltration: better not get caught while you’re in Wolf Space though.

And don’t be in for too long regardless, because the rules change. You lose the door. Different personalities influence how its constituted. All according to the whims of the Moon.

(see Patrick Stewart’s http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2019/06/gackling-moon.html perhaps?)

In any Network Infrastructure, there will be:

The Breeding Pair

Alpha Male – most powerful at the new moon

Alpha Female – most powerful at the full moon

The Pair Apparent

Beta Male – more powerful as moon waxes (Alpha Male’s darkness recedes)

Beta Female – more powerful as moon wanes (Alpha Female’s light recedes)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Inktober/comments/jfbuk3/
monster_manual_inktober_day_21_sleep_jackalwere/

Adolescents

Grubs (Pups). They may or may not actually be children.

The Omega Wolf 

The network administrator. He is still human. The other wolves torment him, and yet they need him. Grizzled but alert. Why does he do it? For the sheer elegance of the system? Terrorized? Lazy, yet driven? Every Omega has a different story.

Dispersers 

Kicked out, looking to form a new pack. Most probably will be killed. Tech Start-Ups. Move fast and break stuff. Look out for these guys. Note that they aren’t a single person: they are an operating PRINCIPLE: gathering a mob until they achieve some sort of stability with another PRINICIPLE or are put down by rivals.

Their Wolf Space is probably pretty wild.

Their Wolf Space might even have more Wolf packs, think of that, hidden away amidst the miasma.

https://www.deviantart.com/mustacheelm

The VCs want to invest in something like that. Mold it to their needs. They need YOU to put in that SEED beans though, get out if you can before the door migrates under the aegis of that silvery satellite. Grow some beanstalks JACK, so that we can get some of that sweet BIOMASS. And further, perhaps even a bit of apotheosis for a derelict humanity:

16 And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. 17 And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. - Genesis 28

MYRMEKES ME IN ST LOUIS

In the BECMI game I am playing in, while engaged in operations against a demon/ancient ant-god alliance, we recently found out there are 5 of the f&&&ers : One Dead, One Asleep, One Married, One Captured, One a Master, or say the mushroom men to whom such secrets are currency. In a futile attempt to curtail the dark powers of these antisocial aculeates through cross-platform ridicule, I have reimagined them into a sitcom.

STAN RUFA, a man so ordinary he wears pants, is trying to fix his sink, but keeps hitting his head on the top. Finally he gives up, chucking his wrench in disgust. Then he retrieves the wrench and beats the hell out of the poor basin, breaking it. “Honey!” he calls out. “I fixed the sink!” (laughter). He retires to his chair to read the funnies.His wife’s offstage voice is a reedy thing, needling him. “Staaaaanly,” says she, “Did you get the lawnmower sharpened? I swear the grass is higher than a horse.” (laughter). “Staaaaanly, did you pay the water bill? Is our checkbook balanced?” “Staaaaanly, did you do x-y-z-y-x-w?" He does his best to ignore her, finally giving up and trying ineffectually to move some of these projects forward.

“Okay, okay,” he says, toddling toward his workbench, only to be distracted again by whatever little thing.

My Mother the Car

“If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself,” says the wife, emerging, to cacophonous cheering. Her steps are thunderous. Stan’s wife is AMBLY BLUE, an ant god! Pan out. Their house is giant! Stan Rufa’s living room that looked like a sitcom set is just a tiny little corner of the greater complex.

Behold the cage constraining MYRMICA GREEN, an ant god! This time she has constructed yet another elaborate and spindly mechanism to extend her reach all the way across the house and snatch a key ring that hangs by the television with the affixed legend No Toukc. A key to fit her cage. Nevermind! Somebody on every occasion will carelessly foil her plans. Stan, perhaps, screwing about in his kitchen. “The pilot light is out again! Where is that matchbook?” and noting an open fire nearby

(a fire that inflates a balloon, that in turn twists the wind-up monkey, whose cymbals spook a rat, who so startled, will rush the wall, in so doing hook the ring on his tinfoil hat, etc., etc.),

Stan employs it to light a rolled-up newspaper torch. And, being a conscientious sort (ha ha), puts out the fire with wild gesticulations

(balloon wilts, monkey-percussion peters out, rushing rat becomes disengaged and goes back to gnawing a nearby recliner cushion instead of entangling the keyring with his paranoia helmet).

Escape thwarted again, Myrmica Green’s resigned exasperation is cruel comedy gold.

The aforementioned recliner at all hours contains CAMPON RED, an ant god! She never wakes up, but participates in all manner of wacky animated dreamscapes where she embodies numerous whacky personas: a pirate captain, a corporate overlord, a trainer of hippopotamus whose charges refuse to leave the wallow to perform a car chase after a purse-snatcher. Her snoring becomes more pronounced when the show remembers she's there.

https://www.deviantart.com/jaaaiiro

And don’t forget the dun, decomposing body of DORYL BLACK, a dead ant god! Or almost dead. She stirs periodically, but then the sun comes out and the giant magnifying glass suspended over her focuses its rays and zaps her all over again (to much hilarity, according to the merciless meter of the laugh track at any rate). Her death jerk foils just as many key-acquisition plots as anybody else’s paroxysms, heartfelt or no.

Today’s episode: Stan is trying to make a X-mas card to send to Santa so he can get a new cordless telephone but it's up to Myrmic Green to Linus-like explain the meaning of the holiday to our beleaguered husband-hero. Green’s command of the religious dogma are, it must be said, idiosyncratic.

https://xaltotun.newgrounds.com/

At every episode’s end, pull out further. The studio audience in fact a single creature straddling the seats, PONERINAE PURPLE, an ant god! Her mandibles move in earie concert to the canned laughter as the credits begin their slow, slow descent, ape from man.

BOXBOATS

Gygax 75    Day 1-3

Elevator Pitch (all art by Bill Sienkiewicz)

• A river, with hostile and inexhaustible adversaries on either bank (the Lawful Goodfolk on one side and the Chaotic Goodfolk on the other, more or less demon-fae and devil-fae)
• Thank goodness the water repels them! Islands of civilization exist in between the shores, protected by the poisonous (to goodfolk) river, promontories of light if you will.
• PCs are from a particularly inhabited island, let’s call it Iscyra. Built up in the center. The rulers are your basic Melnibonéan corrupted elite: life-extended by cyborging themselves up with magical do-dads, more high sorcerous-machine now than man maybe. Gools. Sorcerers.

• A steady procession of living barges washes past - full of the things you need (food, potable water, magic trinkets): these ships double as dungeons - they get harpooned and lashed to shore for a bit, boarded by crack privateers (the PCs among others), before shaking themselves loose. If you want to go shopping, stay on the surface and be prepared to jump. You want something more esoteric, you’ve gotta go down a couple levels: but don’t stay too long or you’ll be living there.

• Where do the barges come from? Who can say (on day 3 of the project). They are filled with rats and ratmen who are relatively organized, but whether these are the original inhabitants or hitchhiker's themselves is unclear.

• But wait! As these barges bumble along, sometimes they will pass too close to shore, and one of the two contagions (Lawful or Chaotic) will make its way aboard and so doing jump the water over to Iscyra. So a barge is more than likely to have some of these guys.

• Untydras. Naturally, the gools got a team who fights em off. These are a warrior cult of aristocrats who eschew the modifications of their bodies in exchange for the short, sharp life. White blood cells if you will. They are not very nice.

• But that aint you. You’re the professional treasure hunters. Go deep enough, you’ll run across the engine: usually a shut in group of cyber-ghouls themselves with powerful appendages that someone from Iscyra will pay top dollar for. Unless you want to start modifying yourself.

Well, you wanna or what?

Well, you wanna or what?

The METAL MONSTER

OK - so the first thing I realized with this whole humans = clerics equation, is the old school will REVOLT because

1 Clerics MUST employ naught but blunt objects

2 Mankind MUST have access to edged weapons : swords and daggers and whatnot

but yo - they really shouldn't though.

I mean, it's illegal and all that : frowned upon. You need special allocation for that like the serf you are : this feudal Japan or early Roman republic only-citizens-can-be-part-of-the-army type thing. The OCCUPIED GOVERNMENT is allowed their dueling swords perhaps: this self-regulates the hotheads. But a bunch of dudes with blades? Never. Polearms, maybe. I mean, per St. Gary, there's so many kinds. That's your brutes of a town watch there. Very handy for designating social rank : you can see WHO is a WHAT from a distance. Is that a Lucerm Hammer or a Bardiche? Feller carrying the one kind must give ample passage to the other.  You can see what's what over the largest crowd.

from https://elemud.fandom.com/wiki/Polearm

      (for further and better employment of polearm taxonomy, please review the Jeff Rients Better Living Through Polearms feature which explores anthropology via fauchard-fork).

You think yon GODS are trying to flip this social order? What part of give unto Ceasar what is Ceasar's don't you understand, Pinkos? Semi-subjugation works just fine for everyone. Play by the rules, ye level 7 Lanas! No edged weapons for you.

So onto said subjugation. It's them lizard people in'nit it that are running things . . . wrong game though. It' elves then. Gotta be the elves. Gotta be.

Everyone hates elves, as they should. That Talislanta advert with the skull headed dude is whats up. 

Exceeeeeept : what's to say dude isn't an elf anyway? He's got the pointy ears, and I'm pretty sure Elves have sharp little teeth. That's what I've been told. They eat babies and such. Lizard people anyway.

       (here I display dual ignorance and fascination of/with Talislanta : other than that the adverts in the back of Dragon magazines I found simultaneously hokey and compelling)

       (and for the curious, the truth is OUT THERE so don't just wallow in your naiveté just to go full hippo and float)

Now, there have been a lot of great OSR stuff over the years with sinister elves, because elves are sinister . . .

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/commentary/whos-boss

. . . and although the best discourse on demihumans and elfen nature is probably Scrap Princess' seminal There Was a Dog at Work Today, He Was a Special Mister Guy post, which containeth a d8 sub-table on which a hypothetical welterweight blogger who took a swing might receive the following augury :

"Star-Man : from the upper upper air, soft and silvery"

Eraldo Carugati

. . . I would posit my own layer of theory, and instead assert that Elves, rather than wisps of slender dreamstuff, are at their core

SHARPENED OBJECTS

Like - you have a blunt object : say a human. Bumbles about, lives, procreates, dies. Takes the shape of it's container. Are they really even alive? Scholars debate.

Or take a really symmetrical object, like a Dwarf, no corners whatsoever. Stacks. Stores well. Hot molten core. Changes the chemical structure of the surroundings.

The elf, on the other hand, just gets more and more elfen : ground against the wetstone of time. Everything is worked to a fine edge.

They are war machines first and foremost : probably dwarf built. Dwarves build most elegant machines. Jokes on you Dwarves! You work for your elf-machines now!  And in every fiction available the elfs are an ancient people!  Ha!

Virgil Finlay

Ancient or not, elves appear to travel in groups, like Bibical angels : odd in number : be it 3s or 7s  : usually there is a Caller who does all the talking. Maybe someone is taking notes. Really though, it's all a single elf and a bunch of mirror images. You are unlikely to encounter 2 at once because they start at each other eventually.

I get a Marvel Comics Elders of the Universe vibe from the f**kers

      (same joke, different comedy club : Eldars of the Universe ha hrmmm - keep the tomatoes coming folks, they are nourishing and the act of throwing de-seeds)

As such, they are the boss : always the little engine at the center of human civilization. With all due respect to the elusive the hidden MYSTERIES housed in Temples or monasteries that grant esoteric wings and talons to these little semi-sentient god-animals humans : there ain't no humans per se until they get them an elf of some kind to sort things out.

Think of them as the mitochondria generating energy : of the cell but not of the cell.

Or spiders. It is well established that Elves are spiders. But they are not trying to catch you in their web. You ARE the web, wheel-of-soldier-of-fortune you.

http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/webproj/212_spring_2019/Rose_Peters/rose_peters/spiderwebs.html

Anyway, Eldars of the Unnnnnnnniverse, you know :

Collector Elves High Elves

Why exactly do these critters collect cities and the like? It's a compulsion is what!

They love to have named teams of adventurers hanging around: they will fete them and give them tasks because it keeps these occupied and they can brag about.

Their cities are elegant and there is no question to whom they belong. It's out in the open. The spoils of empire are out in the open. It's the British Museum out there. With spires and bridges. Symmetry with things stuck in it. Classic Spiral Orb weavers (D).

 

Gardener Elves Wood Elves 

The wood is the thing. They might be running a woods. They possibly are running a city : but it's because it has a famous hanging garden : or has decayed in a particularly wonderful urban-blight porn way.

Or else their "city" might just be a loose collection of settlements. Funnel Web weavers (B) : not sticky : there is less compulsion involved for the inhabitants. Also, less mirror images, more actual elves - their attention is pointed at the plants and not at undermining their fellows.

Contemplator Elves Gray Elves - off in they towers. 

Tubular webs (E - arranged vertically though vs horizontal). There is probably a tripwire to tell them you are coming.

Occasionally a city will spring up around them because the talismanic nature of it and that predators stay distant. It's a must that the Gray elf will occasionally surface to terrorize the squatters and interlopers. Think Shrike Temple in Dan Simmons' Hyperion

Alex Ries

Champion Elves Sea Elves (but Warhammer style). 

Watch out for these guys. They are sailing around, or maybe on a river, except they're all Wardancers. Kraven the hunter motherfuckers. On they ships. Cutlasses and Krakens style.

If you can battle them to a draw they might offer you a position on the ship. Sheet spinners (A) : horizontally laid out over the waters. They have territories, and elegant systems of accounting. They are playing something like capture the flag with each other. If you can get the earing off Jennie Sky Eyes left ear, you now own the shorline from Skull's Point to the Geyser Grey kind of thing.

Grandmaster Elves Drow. Plots! Politics! 

Blue skin just like DEs are supposed to.

Here's your basic OSR type rambling, crumbling Viriconium city. They like all the plots and the chaos of it. Tangle webs like a black widow (C). Despite False Patrick's assertion, it's not hot hatred of your alien nature that makes them torment you, it's the sheer unpredictability of your response to pain.

Like Iron Mike said, "Everyone has a plan until you remove their face with a potato peeler"

The Underdark? F*** the Underdark. The Underdark is all our slave mentality, maaaaaan. There might be some story dudes tell themselves about their great home under the earth which they long to return, but they are running sh** from the flowershop.

It's best to think of these dudes as a Skaven analogue : a lot cleaner though. Cleanest elves of all.

that's OK, because for dirt behind the ears you got :

Possessor Elves Wild Elves.

Or is it Elves gone wild! I like the idea of an artifact that is running things here : THE ITEM ordering around the item: who has who? Or maybe each and every artifact has its own gaggle of elves gathered around it : they are degenerate weirdos.

The most varied organization, because they're out of their minds. Could have started as any other elf type, but that identity has long been subsumed. Those Spiders on Drugs webs? These guys.

WHAT R THE 0 LEVEL HUMANS?

 and if we stat them can we eat them

Vlad Ogorodnyk

so . . . the Author's notes for the first trade of DIE

(which is fantastic, by the way - the D&D cartoon extrapolated to real life : do they ever get home? and then when they do will they get sucked back in?)

           ( . . . fantastic . . . ha ha . . .)

pointed out how weird Clerics in D&D are, particularly at low levels : these small scale, almost clerical

           (in a bureaucratic sense, ha ha again. endless ha has. ha ha's built on a superstructure of ha has . . .)

miracles on order.

Gillen solves this by emphasizing a more adversarial (or transactional) relationship : Gods as bound demons. Cleric as demonologist. Or warlocks for you modernistic 5e types. Or the god is the warlock in a pact with the PC for you post-modernistic e5 types.

this is a fine dynamic, but I think loses something

           (unrepentant cleric player talking here : to me, as a kid, in a lot of ways Deities and Demigods WAS D&D -  and a curse upon your house whoever walked away with my copy containing the Lovecraft/Melniboné stuff)

Erol Otis por obvio

howsabout we, instead of approaching the problem of all these Acolytes are wandering around a mysto Sears catalogue ordering the daily Cure Light Wounds as some kind of cosmological bug

           (that breaks into absurdity as soon as you extrapolate it out to a larger scale and there’s thousands upon thousands of cats calling on tech support at whatever particular high temple),

howsabout we look at it as a feature

mainly, yon old, "How are the Humies, weak and hairless, able to at long last conquer the world?"

           (vs all these elder and Eldar races)

Theodor Kittelsen

What if the humans are God conduits? What if every one is a kind of rudimentary saint? In a way that other critters can't sniff at.

instead of the default class for a young fellow of "dungeoneering ambition" being fighter ("just out of the army gov'ner, looking for a bit of action : yeah I'll go take that coin out of the wizard's fountain ") maybe almost everyone you see is some sort of 0 level cleric . . .

most people don't get much past the cantrip-ized versions of the 1st level spells : if someone is sick, maybe you light a cistern to the Holy Virgin Neutron Star Mother : CLW (level 0 version). 

You get that chill from passing someone who is actual a dead person and whose soul is filled with the Coldness of yon dark and slimy Negative Material Plane : make the sign of the Tooth Shark and it's P fro E (level 0 version).

the effects aren't that much : it's more part of a fundamental part of the human experience - what one, as a human in these cultures where BIG MAGIC does exist out there, does.

A person whose connection to the godhead is more profound will be promptly hoovered up by organized groups as particularly "favored" by the gods and trained up to 1^st level, or perhaps they are just better energy conduits and will get there by misadventure.

          (or, considering that all the other hominid types don't have that advanced access : a lot the hoovering maybe by the other races : what's the deal with the goblins always leaving bundles of screaming mudstraw in babies' cribs anyway?  well, how else are they gonna have a tete-a-tete with Maglubiyet if they don't have a manchild to do the conversing?)

PJ Lynch